ABSTRACT
The main source of indigenous African law is custom; and it hardly needs to be emphasized that customary law—and in particular the customary law of a preliterate people—does not lend itself readily to conventional methods of legal study. In other circles, besides those of anthropologists, there has been a growing realization of the importance of formulating and recording native law. The specifically legal character and form which it tends to exhibit may owe something to the impress of modern political changes; but it remains, in substance, a body of traditional law. The student of African customary law is largely dependent for his ‘raw material on the work of anthropologists. The most fruitful method, where sufficient material was available, would consist in the combination of anthropological data with case-material from the courts. Published anthropological material is probably sufficient to provide at any rate the nucleus of a comparative legal study of African marriage.
